'what a long way, i thought, i've come — to be destroyed!' ― james baldwin, giovanni's room

'was it possible to live outside language?' ― arundhati roy, the ministry of utmost happiness

freedom. it isn’t once.... freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. from all the lost collections.' ― adrienne rich, a wild patience has taken me this far

'be nobody's darling; be an outcast. take the contradictions of your life and wrap around you like a shawl.' ― alice walker, revolutionary petunias

'fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam. numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. lives ticking on as if.' — adrienne rich, what kind of times are these from later poems: selected and new 1971-2012

'i wept until i aged myself. i watched it happen in the mirror. i watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill.' — maggie nelson, bluets

'and when they bombed other people's houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.' ― ilya kaminsky, deaf republic

'i shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere! i shall involve myself wholly … everything matters! the only thing i resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect.' ― susan sontag, reborn

'people who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things..' ― james baldwin, giovanni's room

'i wake up & it breaks my heart.' ― cameron awkward-rich, meditations in an emergency

'although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. the world will not stop if i make a mistake.' ― audre lorde, the cancer journals

'the hour of fulfillment is buried in years of patience' ― mary oliver, dream work

'in the beginning i was so young and such a stranger to myself i hardly existed. i had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before i knew at all who i was, what i was, what i wanted to be.' ― mary oliver, upstream: selected essays

'i simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and i did not know how i would get through mine.' ― james baldwin, giovanni's room

'when you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. but it's not.' ― richard kadrey, aloha from hell

'if life is a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves + indentations of which are agony, disconsolations + the most painful insights, then the casting from this … is happiness, assent—most perfect + most certain bliss.' ― susan sontag, reborn

'nothing i accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.' ― audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches

'let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.' ― mary oliver, song of the builders

'so what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness? and haven't we got the right to hope--for more? so that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?' ― james baldwin, another country

'was it possible to live outside language?' ― arundhati roy, the ministry of utmost happiness